It is in a big Five Star hotel. It has it's own round lift taking you from the lobby to the restaurant. It has its own water feature. Beautiful view of Central and parts of the Kowloon peninsula. Welcome to One Harbour Road - an upmarket Chinese restaurant at Grand Hyatt hotel. It's Cantonese and everything is well presented (it uses some of the best tableware in town). The food is generally good (though we ordered too much and a couple of strange dishes). The service is polite and non-intrusive - my fellow dinner did not notice how many times his wine glass was filled until the bottle was emptied!
What was enjoyable? The atmosphere, setting, table service and most of the food.
What was not enjoyable? Our waiter should have stopped us from ordering too much - almost half of the food was wasted because of that!
Those of us London-centric folks easily forget there are great concert halls in other parts of the world. I remember as a young kid buying DG LPs with von Karajan on the front cover conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. So as my first visit to the city, a visit to the Philharmonie to listen to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was a must. Ivan Fisher started the evening's concert with Haydn Symphony 88. A light and delightful work. As I'd expected, the acoustic of the hall was amazing - probably a good 2.5 second of reverberation - and much more generous than the Royal Festival Hall in London. The strings sounded sweet and the timpani came through clearly with definition. The audience was then treated to Béla Bartók's Seven Pieces for Choir and Chamber Orchestra: the Berlin Phil reduced in size occupying only half of the stage while the Netherlands Youth Choir took the other half. These young performers (all female) sang in Hungarian from memory - not easy at all - and rea...
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